Reading List

Authors Like Willa Cather

Willa Cather was nine when her family moved from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, and the immigrant farm families around Red Cloud became her subject. Sarah Orne Jewett advised her to write about her own country, and Cather dedicated O Pioneers! (1913) to her. After a visit home in 1916 she built My Ántonia (1918) on her childhood friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian girl. One of Ours won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923; its hero is partly based on her cousin G. P. Cather, killed at Cantigny in 1918. She destroyed many of her letters and asked friends to do the same, and her will restricted quotation from the rest until the Selected Letters of 2013. The ten writers below share her subject: land, memory and the people who made a life on it, including those who were there first.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · American classics · The prairie and the West · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Willa Cather, start with Sarah Orne Jewett, whose The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) was the model for Cather’s quiet portraits of a place, and Ole Edvart Rølvaag, whose Giants in the Earth (1927) follows Norwegian homesteaders in Dakota Territory. Kent Haruf’s Plainsong (1999) brings the same plain style to a small town on the Colorado plains. Further down are a Native American novelist and Toni Morrison, who read Cather’s land and history differently.

10 authors like Willa Cather

01
Her teacher

Sarah Orne Jewett

American · Deephaven (1877), A White Heron (1886), The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)

Jewett was born in South Berwick, Maine, in 1849 and died there in 1909. The Country of the Pointed Firs, the book that made her reputation, is a set of linked sketches of a small coastal town in Maine. She lived for many years with Annie Adams Fields in what was then called a Boston marriage.

The writer who told Cather to trust her own country, and the root of her quiet, closely observed portraits of a community. Cather dedicated O Pioneers! to her.

— Lisanne
02
Land as fate

Thomas Hardy

British · Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)

Hardy was born in Dorset in 1840 and set most of his fiction in Wessex, his version of south-west England. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, subtitled ‘A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented’, angered many reviewers, and after the hostile reception of Jude the Obscure (1895) he gave up the novel for poetry. He died in 1928.

Hardy wrote rural people bound to one landscape a generation before Cather, in England. He is darker; Cather’s farm women more often endure.

— Lisanne

Every book by Thomas Hardy →

03
The immigrant homestead

Ole Edvart Rølvaag

Norwegian-American · Giants in the Earth (1923–24; English 1927)

Rølvaag was born in Dønna, Norway, in 1876 and emigrated to South Dakota in 1896. Giants in the Earth combines two novels he published in Norwegian in 1923 and 1924, about Norwegian homesteaders struggling with the land and weather of Dakota Territory; the English version appeared in 1927. He died in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1931.

The book closest to O Pioneers! and My Ántonia in subject, written from inside an immigrant community rather than by a neighbour. Rølvaag shows what the prairie cost in ways Cather often leaves offstage.

— Lisanne
04
Nebraska, harder

Mari Sandoz

American · Old Jules (1935), Crazy Horse (1942)

Sandoz was born near Hay Springs, Nebraska, in 1896 and grew up on her family’s farm in the Sandhills. Old Jules, a biography of her Swiss immigrant father, a violent and domineering man who disapproved of her writing, was published in 1935 after fourteen rejections. She also wrote histories of the Plains peoples, including Crazy Horse and Cheyenne Autumn (1953). She died in 1966.

Sandoz wrote Nebraska’s settlers without nostalgia and gave the Lakota and Cheyenne books of their own. Read her as a corrective to Cather’s gentler prairie.

— Lisanne
05
The West, a generation on

Wallace Stegner

American · Angle of Repose (1971), Crossing to Safety (1987)

Stegner (1909–1993) grew up moving around the American and Canadian West and founded the creative writing programme at Stanford. Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972; it was based on the letters of the writer Mary Hallock Foote and used passages from them without credit, which has caused controversy ever since.

Stegner continues Cather’s West: settlers, marriage and memory, in a careful realist style. Angle of Repose also shares her interest in a woman making a life far from where she began.

— Lisanne

Every book by Wallace Stegner →

06
The land before the settlers

Louise Erdrich

American (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) · Love Medicine (1984), The Night Watchman (2020)

Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, in 1954 and is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Love Medicine, told in many voices, follows several Ojibwe families in North Dakota across decades and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Night Watchman, based on her grandfather’s fight against a 1950s bill to end federal recognition of tribes, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Erdrich writes the northern plains from the side of the people whose land the homesteaders took. Read her after My Ántonia to complicate the pioneer story.

— Lisanne

Every book by Louise Erdrich →

07
Cather, reread

Toni Morrison

American · Beloved (1987), Playing in the Dark (1992)

Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 and died in 2019. Playing in the Dark, a short book of criticism, argues that Black presence shaped the work of white American writers. Its reading of how race shapes and misshapes Cather’s last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, has influenced Cather scholarship since.

The writer on this list who argues with Cather. Morrison shows what Sapphira and the Slave Girl, set among enslaved people in Cather’s family’s Virginia, could not see.

— Lisanne

Every book by Toni Morrison →

08
The plains, plainly

Kent Haruf

American · Plainsong (1999), Our Souls at Night (2015)

Haruf was born in Pueblo, Colorado, in 1943 and set his novels in Holt, an invented town on the Colorado plains. Plainsong brings together a pregnant teenager and the two elderly bachelor brothers who take her in. Our Souls at Night was published after his death in 2014.

Haruf writes Cather’s plains a century later in the same plain sentences, with the same respect for unglamorous people. Plainsong is the nearest modern match for her tone.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kent Haruf →

09
Memory and the Midwest

Marilynne Robinson

American · Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004)

Robinson was born in Sandpoint, Idaho, in 1943, and her first novel, Housekeeping, appeared in 1980. Gilead, a letter from an elderly Iowa minister to his young son, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005.

Robinson shares Cather’s long memory of a small Midwestern place and her interest in faith and the frontier past. Read Gilead after Death Comes for the Archbishop.

— Lisanne

Every book by Marilynne Robinson →

10
The West, unsentimental

Annie Proulx

American · The Shipping News (1993), Close Range (1999), Barkskins (2016)

Proulx was born in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1935. The Shipping News won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and Close Range, her stories of Wyoming, includes ‘Brokeback Mountain’, filmed by Ang Lee in 2005. She moved to a ranch in Wyoming in 1994.

Proulx writes the land as Cather did, as the force that shapes the people on it, but with violence and black comedy in place of Cather’s calm. Read her for the West that Cather’s pioneers turned into.

— Lisanne

Every book by Annie Proulx →

Where to start if you loved Willa Cather

If you want her teacher, read Sarah Orne Jewett.

The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is short and shows where Cather’s quiet method came from.

If you want the immigrant prairie, read Ole Edvart Rølvaag.

Giants in the Earth is the natural companion to My Ántonia.

If you want a modern match, read Kent Haruf.

Plainsong (1999) is set in an invented town on the Colorado plains.

If you want a different view of the land, read Louise Erdrich.

Love Medicine (1984) follows Ojibwe families in North Dakota.

If you want to go back to Cather, start with My Ántonia.

Then read O Pioneers! (1913) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).

Frequently asked questions about authors like Willa Cather

Who writes like Willa Cather?

Sarah Orne Jewett, Ole Edvart Rølvaag and Kent Haruf are the closest: Jewett for quiet portraits of a place, Rølvaag for immigrant homesteaders, Haruf for the plains in plain prose.

What should I read after My Ántonia?

Try Rølvaag’s Giants in the Earth (1927) for Norwegian settlers in Dakota Territory, or Mari Sandoz’s Old Jules (1935) for a harder account of Nebraska.

Is Willa Cather like Sarah Orne Jewett?

Closely: Jewett advised Cather to write about her own country, and Cather dedicated O Pioneers! to her. Jewett wrote coastal Maine; Cather wrote Nebraska and the Southwest.

Does Willa Cather have a new book?

No. Cather died in 1947; her last book, The Old Beauty and Others, appeared in 1948, and her Selected Letters were published in 2013.

Which Willa Cather book should I read first?

My Ántonia (1918) is the usual start; O Pioneers! (1913) is shorter, and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) shows her later style.

Did Willa Cather win the Pulitzer Prize?

Yes, in 1923, for One of Ours, whose hero is partly based on her cousin G. P. Cather, killed in France in 1918.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

— Willa Cather, My Ántonia.

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